More than 40% of IT security professionals say they have been urged by company executives to keep IT security breaches confidential when they should have been reported, and 30% say they stayed silent on their own initiative, according to a global study from Bitdefender.

The study also shows that 55% of respondents expressed concern about the legal ramifications their company could face due to a security breach that was not properly remediated.

The research was commissioned by Bitdefender by Censuswide on a sample of over 400 IT security professionals between December 2022 and January 2023.

The respondents work in positions ranging from managers to chief information security officers (CISOs) in companies with more than 1,000 employees in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Until recently, many companies chose to hide security breaches to avoid financial, legal, and reputational damage, and to use resources to mitigate the damage rather than report these incidents. This is expected to change with the passing of more breach reporting laws (in the US and the EU).

98% of IT security professionals say they are not completely satisfied with the current solutions they use, and more than half of them (54%) say their organization purchased a security service that did not meet expectations.

Another common concern is the cybersecurity skills shortage, which looks set to affect many organizations over the next 12 months. 59% of respondents say they have to work weekends because of security issues their company faces.

Vulnerable software is the biggest problem for IT professionals

Almost all IT security professionals (99%) say they are concerned about security threats in their organizations.

They are most concerned about software vulnerabilities and zero-day threats (53%), followed by phishing/social engineering (52%). Threats to supply chains rank third (49%), and ransomware attacks rank fourth (48.5%).

The main challenge identified is expanding capabilities across multiple environments (43%), followed by threat complexity (43%), lack of skills in this area (36%), incompatibility with other security solutions (32%), and reporting capabilities (28). %), too many notifications (27%), unnecessary features (21.5%). Only 2% of respondents say that they have not encountered any problems.

“The findings in this report highlight the enormous pressure on organizations to combat emerging threats such as ransomware, zero-day vulnerabilities and spyware. At the same time, we notice that among the challenges are the complexity of expanding security services and the lack of qualified personnel,” says Andrei Florescu, Bitdefender’s Vice President of Business Solutions.

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